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No_one  1yr ago (text post)   3597 thread views

Baldur's Gate 3 thread (no spoilers outside of spoiler tags) - reviews, technical matters, griping etc.

Intro

Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.

A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.

It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.

It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.

Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.

As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.

For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||

Rules:

  1. Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.

  2. For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.

  3. Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.

  4. Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.

[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.

And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.

**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.

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What videogames would you say have excellent writing, then?

Brigador. Homeworld. House of the Dying Sun. The writing is short and to the point and qualitatively decent and all of it supports the gameplay or world-building and isn't just wordy padding. Remove any of the writing in those games and they'll be poorer for it, because what little there is serves a purpose and is good enough to be worth reading.

Okay, that was a bit of a joke doubling down on "videogame writing is universally bad" by implying that the less, the better. Serious answer: None that I can remember. Cyberpunk 2077's writing is pretty good IMO, but I really mean that it's pretty good for a videogame. I enjoyed my time with it, recommend it, would happily play and read more of it, but even then it's the whole immersive package that makes it work, and the writing mostly contributes by being above-average for its medium.

So far, whenever I followed someone's suggestion of "play this, it's text-heavy but well-written!", I ended up sorely disappointed.

Game writing tends to be derivative (all fantasy CRPGs, all AAA titles), or excessively pretentious (Sunless Seas/Skies, Cultist Simulator), or just plain low-quality either because the developers barely speak English and saw no need for proper localization (E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Shadow Empire) or because the writers they hired are untalented hacks (Hunt: Showdown, Destiny 2).

There may be games with good writing in genres that I don't play, but I don't really consider visual novels and the like games.

Have you played Outer Wilds? I feel like it has some of the best writing for a game, and a lot of that is because of where they put the writing.

I started it, it having come heavily recommended from multiple sources.

...but then I stopped because I'm too much of a caveman for games without shootybangsmash. Yeah, I know. I should probably give it another go, if only to see whether its reputation holds up.

Well my ears are burning. So what media would you say has excellent writing? Because it seems to me like you object to anything that gets in the way of gameplay and your favourite games would be the likes of Galaga and Centipede.

Since your perspective is so alien to my own, I hope you don't mind some additional curiosity - what did you think of something like Super Hot, or aliens dark descent, or grim dawn? And how would you rank fire emblem, xcom and total war? Oh, and what you do you think of grand strategy games?

Well my ears are burning. So what media would you say has excellent writing? Some books. A few films.

Because it seems to me like you object to anything that gets in the way of gameplay and your favourite games would be the likes of Galaga and Centipede.

Hey, I do appreciate some plot and lore and world-building in games. But the formula is (quality divided by quantity). If quality isn't possible, then I do prefer the least quantity required to let the game make sense. In cases where that means no writing at all, the game is usually too simple to hold my interest.

Since your perspective is so alien to my own, I hope you don't mind some additional curiosity - what did you think of something like Super Hot, or aliens dark descent, or grim dawn? And how would you rank fire emblem, xcom and total war? Oh, and what you do you think of grand strategy games?

  • Superhot: Massively overrated. Gameplay is an one-trick pony. Writing is aggressively bad. Would recommend staying away from.
  • ADD: Never played, can't say.
  • Grim Dawn: It's okay for an ARPG, which isn't saying much. Not my cup of tea. The writing struck me as utterly forgettable, but sparse and irrelevant enough compared to the massive levels to not get in the way.
  • Fire Emblem: Never played.
  • XCOM: I like those. For the gameplay, that is. What little writing they have seems pointless to engage with - the plot never goes anywhere, the world isn't built up, might as well ignore anything but the instructions.
  • Total War: I fondly remember the very first Shogun: Total War, and I must say that I'm disappointment by what that entire series has become. The gameplay is extremely stale, and the writing - what little of it is there - is trash.
  • Grand Strategy: Do you mean Paradox map-painting simulators? I played EU3, HOI4 and Stellaris, and I've come to thoroughly regret that as wasted time. The gameplay is a mess and the writing, piecemeal as it is, is not worth sticking around for. And maybe I'm too much of a rube, but that worm story in Stellaris was so much pretentious crap. Apart from Paradox, let's say looking at Stellar Monarch, Terra Invicta and Dominions, I'd say Grand Strategy has a few intriguing titles, but most of them are very flawed in many ways and their writing is above average at the most.

Hey, I do appreciate some plot and lore and world-building in games. But the formula is (quality divided by quantity).

Ah ok, that is not so inscrutable a position to me, although I am still intrigued - I would be more generous in my appraisal, but your assessments are directionally similar to mine (btw you'll hate the writing in dark descent, but if you like Brigador and XCOM I reckon you'll enjoy the gameplay.) What do you think of roguelikes like caves of qud and dcss? And one out of left field - what's your opinion of the song-writing of David Bowie?

Sorry if it feels like I'm grilling you, but your original post opened my eyes a bit - I had fallen into the wordcel trap of assuming anyone with greater intelligence than me must love words even more than me (deep down I always knew that wasn't the case, I was typical minding). And when I read your post and remembered that that was not the case, I also realised I'd never really tried to see the medium from your perspective (hence my overly reductionist opener).

Ah ok, that is not so inscrutable a position to me, although I am still intrigued - I would be more generous in my appraisal, but your assessments are directionally similar to mine (btw you'll hate the writing in dark descent, but if you like Brigador and XCOM I reckon you'll enjoy the gameplay.) What do you think of roguelikes like caves of qud and dcss? And one out of left field - what's your opinion of the song-writing of David Bowie?

Roguelikes I like.

Qud stands out as one with good world-building, which I always like playing for the atmosphere although even then I think the actual texts are somewhat overrated and pretentious.

DCSS stands out as one that's pleasantly streamlined and requires no great investment of time to play but has no plot or world-building to speak of, IIRC.

I have played many roguelikes and I like the genre, but here too good writing is rare. Even though some of them manage unique world-building or an immersive atmosphere, it's rarely down to the words.

As for David Bowie, I can't say. I'm barely able to place his music. Looking up some "best lyrics" of his on google, it seems fairly random. I'd withhold judgement on account of insufficient exposure.

Sorry if it feels like I'm grilling you, but your original post opened my eyes a bit - I had fallen into the wordcel trap of assuming anyone with greater intelligence than me must love words even more than me (deep down I always knew that wasn't the case, I was typical minding). And when I read your post and remembered that that was not the case, I also realised I'd never really tried to see the medium from your perspective (hence my overly reductionist opener).

Going by the standards of the Motte, it's likely that I am not more intelligent than you. Pretty sure I'm at the low end here. But while we're defending our positions - I must say that on account of having little time to play, I am very quick to dismiss any individual game as not worth my time, and so it's entirely possible that my opinions are too negative by default.

Recommendation for David Bowie album: Station to Station. Yes, it's during his Thin White Duke (alleged) fascist heroin chic phase, but it's good music.

To hell with David Bowie - we were just at a pub music quiz and despite the fact that all members of the team had extensively listened to Station to Station, we still got the question "What song has this lyric: It's not the side-effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love" wrong.

What the heck? I'm sorry for not replying earlier, I thought I did, I thought I replied yesterday but I guess it didn't take? This has been happening a lot lately.

Anyway, I thought you might like roguelikes, but I would have guessed you'd go stone soup over caves of qud. Caves of qud is so great though, although yeah it is a bit pretentious. Part of the difference here is clearly that I have a much higher tolerance for shlock and pretentiousness.

CoQ has a unique setting whereas DCSS is entirely generic. I do prefer the straightforward gameplay in DCSS, but not enough to offset Qud's merits.

Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds are the only two that come to mind for me, at least.

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